Month: January 2008

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Grammar Workshop: Comparative and Superlative Adjectives

by Jennie Ruby

A visit with my nephew over the holidays turned out to be an adventure in comparatives and superlatives. Adjectives can be used to compare things. One snowball may be large, a second might be larger, and a third might be the largest. Larger is the "comparative" form of the adjective. Largest is the "superlative" form. The comparative form is used to compare two things, and the superlative is used only when comparing more than two things. So if my nephew has only two snowballs, one of them may be larger than the other, but there is no largest. When he throws one of the two snowballs at me, it might be the larger or it might be the smaller snowball that he throws, but it cannot be the largest or smallest.

So if I am playing school and I answer one of two questions, did I answer the hardest one or the easiest one? Neither. I answered either the harder one or the easier one, but since there were only two questions, there was no easiest or hardest question.

So far, so good, but what about irregular adjectives such as good, bad, many, and little? These are some of our most common adjectives, and our most confusing. Here are the forms for these:

  • good, better, best
  • bad, worse, worst
  • many, more, most
  • much, more, most
  • little, littler, littlest
  • little, less, least

Many and much share the same comparative and superlative forms. With things that can be counted, start with many: I have many Skittles, my sister has more Skittles, but my nephew has the most Skittles. But when it comes to things that come in mass and that cannot be counted, start with much: Did my sister eat much food? I think my nephew ate more food than she did, but I am sure I ate the most food.

With little, you might be referring to size or you might be referring to amount. My nephew petted the littlest puppy [size]. My sister had the least mashed potatoes [amount].

The words more and most have one more job beyond being the comparative and superlative forms of many and much. They can be used to make the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives that do not have their own comparative and superlative forms: My nephew is more talented at drumming than I am. My nephew is the most energetic member of our family after a large meal.

About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

Want help with a grammar issue? Email us your troubles and we’ll turn Jennie loose!

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Adobe Captivate: So Many Movies, So Little Time! How Long Should It Take to Produce a Project?

Over the years, I’ve developed hundreds, if not thousands, of Captivate projects–also known as movies. And I’ve been teaching Captivate around the country since before Captivate was known as Captivate (for those of you who are new to Captivate, the program used to be called RoboDemo back in the day).

One of the most frequently asked questions I hear from clients and students is: "On average, how much time should I budget to record and produce each lesson?"

The amount of time it will take to record and clean up a project is based largely on the size of the project. So let’s determine project size. Captivate projects are based on the number of slides, similar to PowerPoint. I break project sizes into four categories:

  • Small: Up to 20 or 30 slides
  • Medium: Up to 60 or 80 slides
  • Large: Up to 100 or 120 slides
  • Jumbo: 130 slides and beyond

I believe that each Captivate project you create should be kept as small as possible to achieve your goals for the lesson. And you should develop lessons that a user can complete in five minutes or less. Why?

  • Smaller projects are simply faster to produce than larger projects
  • Smaller projects typically result in a smaller published SWF file. Since smaller SWFs stream and begin playing for your users faster than large SWFs, it just makes sense to produce small SWFs.
  • Adult learners are busy. They may be stressed out and possibly distracted. Some of your learners won’t be enthusiastic because, to be quite honest, many of them are being forced to take your lessons for one reason or another. If you make your lessons too long, the effectiveness of your lessons may be minimized.

Here is a real-world scenario: You have been hired to produce a one-hour course. The course will contain 12, 5-minute lessons.

So, how much time should you budget to create this course? In my experience, you should budget 10 hours per five minute Captivate project. Some simple math means you should budget 120 hours to create the course (approximately 3 weeks). That timing includes:

  • Recording the 12 lessons using Captivate
  • Adding/editing Text Captions (where the text would be copied and pasted from a NotePad or Word file)
  • Adding interactivity such as click boxes, buttons and/or text entry boxes and audio clips to a majority of the slides
  • Adding approximately six Question Slides
  • Publishing
  • Posting
  • Testing
  • Fixing
  • Republishing
  • Reposting
  • Retesting

The timing does not include:

  • Script Writing
  • Script Rehearsals
  • Writing the Questions and Answers for the Question Slides
  • Audio Recording
  • Audio Cleanup 

On average, I recommend you budget up to 20 hours for writing and developing a script to support the 1-hour course.

Of course, none of this timing takes 508 compliance into account. You could easily add 50% to your production costs/timing if such 508 compliant features such as closed captions are required.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Please let me know how long it’s taking you to produce your lessons. If possible, let me know the length of your typical lessons and give as much detail as you can. I’ll post responses in future newsletters.

Got a Captivate production problem that’s making you pull your hair out? Email your problem and let others learn solutions from your experience.

Want to learn more about Captivate? Click here.

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Questions of the Week

Question About Captivate Project Size

I’ve been told by my IT team at work that a Captivate project shouldn’t be larger than 60 slides. What’s the problem with larger projects? And just how many slides makes a project large?

Answer

Actually, a 60 slide project isn’t a problem. I start to worry about project size when you get over 100 slides, and even then, only projects in excess of 150 slides would really get my attention.

We recently produced a lesson for a client that ended up containing more than 200 slides–which is HUGE. While the project contained more than 200 slides, Captivate performed perfectly. The only thing we noticed, performance-wise, was that it took more time than usual to open, save and publish the project.

If a project is large, it will take you longer to produce. We ended up spending more than 20 hours to produce the 200-slide lesson I mentioned earlier instead of the typical 10 hours.  In addition to a longer production cycle, it’s going to take longer for the published lesson to download off of the Web. And it will likely take too long for a user to complete. I recommend that you create lessons (projects) that can be completed by your users in 5 minutes or less. You can have several lessons, each part of a bigger course.

Keep in mind that larger projects throw your production cycle out of whack since it is very hard to budget for a massive project. Instead, it’s easier to budget if you keep the size of your project reasonable (under 100 slides). In the article about Captivate production time in this very newsletter, you will see that I recommend you budget 10 hours to produce a five-minute lesson (which should be under said 100 slides).

Question About Linking One Captivate Project to Another

I’ve linked one Captivate project together via a button. The way it’s supposed to work is that when a user clicks the button, another project is supposed to open. When I test the button in the published movie, I get an error message that says the file I’m trying to link to cannot be found. Any ideas?

Answer

I suspect that the reason your link to other project is not working is because each of the published project files are in their own folders. Place all of the published files in one large folder on your server and the links should work (assuming you have published all of the linked projects).

Got a Question You’d Like Answered? Email me.

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Grammar Workshop: I versus Me

by Jennie Ruby

When we were kids my sister used to say things like "Jennie and me went to the store." And what did every adult say to her in response? "It’s ‘Jennie and I.’" After a few times, being an obedient child, she started saying "Jennie and I" at all times. Unfortunately, this strategy resulted in the occasional incorrect sentence such as "The store clerk gave Jennie and I some candy."

Now, I don’t know whether adults started correcting her back the other direction by saying "No, it’s ‘Jennie and me,’" but I do know that she and many adults have stuck with what I call the "Jennie and I" phenomenon. This results in the occasional incorrect sentence. Let’s take a closer look.

"I" versus "me" illustrates a concept known as pronoun case. When some personal pronouns are used as the subject of a verb, they are spelled one way (I, he, she, we, they), and when they are used as the object of a verb or of a preposition, they are spelled another way (me, him, her, us, them). Here are some examples of correct sentences:

  • I went to the store.
  • The clerk gave me some candy.

When we are including another person in the sentence, it can be harder to tell which pronoun to use. To be polite, the tradition is to name the other person first. But to get the case of the pronoun correct, a good strategy is to temporarily leave the other person out of it, determine which pronoun to use, then put the other person back into the sentence like this:

Andy and me took on a new assignment.

Remove Andy, and you have

Me took on a new assignment.

The pronoun is actually the subject of the sentence, and thus should be "I":

I took on a new assignment.

Then put Andy back in, and you have the correct sentence:

Andy and I took on a new assignment.

Remember: look for whether the pronoun is the subject or the object in the sentence.

About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

Want help with a grammar issue? Email us your troubles and we’ll turn Jennie loose!

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Writing Workshop: Wow Learners with the “Wow” Factor

I’m always looking to showcase a product’s most exciting aspects in my eLearning scripts, books and classes–something I call the "wow factor" or the "wow response."

One of the reasons I am still in the classroom teaching (I’ve been at it nearly 15 years) is that I get to see the "wow response" in action.

When creating lessons, try to keep in mind that your learners are busy. If you can’t get them excited about the product, or indicate clear "real world" advantages to using the product, your lessons are doomed.

I’ve written several books over the years. One of my first books was about Microsoft Word. One of Word’s most important, and least understood, features is style sheets.

When I was preparing to write the module on style sheets, I was mindful that creating lessons that didn’t make sense, or were out of order, would cause more harm than good. I was most concerned with the order of the processes necessary to create, use and edit styles. In the end, I created lessons that flowed like this:

  1. Use existing style sheets. (This quickly showed how powerful styles can be and got the "wow" response from students in class.)
  2. Create custom style sheets. (This showed how easy it is to create custom style sheets. It also gets a "wow" response.)
  3. Use custom style sheets.
  4. Edit style sheets. (Almost always gets a bunch of "wows.")

Beyond lessons that make sense and promote the "wow response," I’ve found that lessons that allow the learners to create a project are better than those that simply show how a feature works. With that in mind, I developed a project that would be used as the theme of the course. Then I made sure that I had the activities mapped out in a logical sequence that would support the project.

How did it all turn out? The first time I taught the Word class (it was a one-day, six hour course), I kept track of the "wow responses." Here’s the score:

  • 14 "wows"
  • 24 "now that’s cool"
  • and countless "head nods."

You can say what you want about reactions like that… but I’ll sum it up with "WOW!"